The Swift Boating of Cindy Sheehan

Frank Rich of the NY Times is on a tear - calling out the right-wing smear of Cindy Sheehan with this fantastic piece on Sunday...

He notes:

True to form, the attack on Cindy Sheehan surfaced early on Fox News, where she was immediately labeled a "crackpot" by Fred Barnes. The right-wing blogosphere quickly spread tales of her divorce, her angry Republican in-laws, her supposed political flip-flops, her incendiary sloganeering and her association with known ticket-stub-carrying attendees of "Fahrenheit 9/11." Rush Limbaugh went so far as to declare that Ms. Sheehan's "story is nothing more than forged documents - there's nothing about it that's real."

Then Rich goes on to mention how ineffective this reactionary response is...

But this time the Swift Boating failed, utterly, and that failure is yet another revealing historical marker in this summer's collapse of political support for the Iraq war.

Let's give the American people credit and reveal what the radical right is hiding:

The public knows that what matters this time is Casey Sheehan's story, not the mother who symbolizes it. Cindy Sheehan's bashers, you'll notice, almost never tell her son's story. They are afraid to go there because this young man's life and death encapsulate not just the noble intentions of those who went to fight this war but also the hubris, incompetence and recklessness of those who gave the marching orders.

Cindy Sheehan and her band or mothers reveal the pain behind the lies, the collateral damage - one the Left has been searching for to show that war is not the answer and the Right is trying desperately deny to put party politics over people. Sheehan, both son Casey and mother Cindy, are American heroes. Both went into the belly of the beast for love of country and democracy - one died, the other is trying to dig herself out, against all odds.

Rich surmises:

The strategy of fighting a war without shared national sacrifice has at last backfired, just as the strategy of Swift Boating the war's critics has reached its Waterloo before Patrick Fitzgerald's grand jury in Washington. The 24/7 cable and Web attack dogs can keep on sliming Cindy Sheehan. The president can keep trying to ration the photos of flag-draped caskets. But this White House no longer has any more control over the insurgency at home than it does over the one in Iraq.

It is time to bring home the troops and start treating people and democracy like people and democracy...